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Discrimination of inclined path segments by the desert ant Cataglyphis fortis

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Abstract

Desert ants (Cataglyphis fortis) navigate by means of path integration, and perform accurately even in undulating terrain. They are able to correctly calculate the ground distance between nest and feeder even if their foraging excursion leads them over corrugated surfaces. To compute the respective ground projection when walking over an inclined surface, ants must measure its slope with sufficient accuracy—but how they do so is still not understood. Using a new behavioural assay that included a negative reinforcement, we investigated how well different slopes are discriminated by the ants. Ants were trained to visit an elevated feeder, via a ramp of fixed inclination (five training inclinations were used: 0°, 15°, 30°, 45°, 60°). The ants discriminated a steeper test slope that differed from the training slope by 12.5°. This discrimination performance was found to be constant for training slopes between 0° and 45°. Ants trained on a 60° slope, however, did not discriminate all steeper slopes, up to a vertical ascent, from the 60° inclination. The consequences of this discrimination accuracy for errors in the path integration process are discussed.

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Acknowledgments

We thank Mathiijs Boeschoten for his enduring assistance in the field work, Fleur Lebhard for help and discussions, and in particular Rüdiger Wehner for continuous support, many inspiring discussions and helpful comments on the manuscript. Gunnar Grah provided the original data of the 2005 experiment. We gratefully acknowledge the permission, granted by the Tunesian government, to carry out these investigations in this beautiful country. This work was financed by grants from the DFG (Ro 547/10-1) and the Volkswagen Foundation (I/78 574) to B.R. The experiments comply with the “Principles of animal Care” and with the current German law.

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The authors declare that they have no conflict of interests.

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  1. Department of Biology, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Invalidenstraße 43, 10115, Berlin, Germany

    Sabine Wintergerst & Bernhard Ronacher

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  1. Sabine Wintergerst
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  2. Bernhard Ronacher
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Correspondence to Bernhard Ronacher.

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Wintergerst, S., Ronacher, B. Discrimination of inclined path segments by the desert ant Cataglyphis fortis . J Comp Physiol A 198, 363–373 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00359-012-0714-5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00359-012-0714-5

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